May 18, 2009

A Brief History of Autotune

Cool rundown and analysis by Jace Clayton:

Pitch PerfectThe History of Autotune

The most important piece of musical equipment of the last 10 years is not an instrument or a physical object. It’s called Auto-Tune and is used on roughly 90 per cent of all pop songs. It is what’s known as a ‘plug-in’, a specialized piece of software made to be inserted into other, bigger pieces of audio software. Auto-Tune bends off-key notes into pitch perfection.

Auto-Tune was initially used discreetly to smooth over wrong notes. It is fitting that Cher’s 1998 single ‘Believe’ brought the first cosmetic (rather than corrective) use of Auto-Tune to mainstream visibility: when the taut skin and other side-effects of repeat plastic surgery form their own aesthetic, we can think of it in terms of Auto-Tune. Where you can hear certain phrases on ‘Believe’ go robotic – that’s Auto-Tune at work. Within a few years the production secret (and illegal copies of the expensive software) had seeped into studios worldwide, problematizing the connection between voice and body along the way...